In the episode, which has filmed but has yet to air, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. reveals to the Republican House leader that about 3 percent of his DNA is Ashkenazi Jewish. Gates said he traced the Jewish ancestry back to 1531.

"You could have knocked him over with a feather and then he was very proud of it," Gates said of the Speaker's reaction. “We don't know who that Jewish person was, but we know it was on his mother's German line, which makes sense. So somebody who was a Christian German slept with a Jewish German person and that's where that came from.”

“I’m proud of his courage, and willingly going to his own death in order to protect innocent people,” Sanders says tearfully in the video released last year. “So I’m very, very proud that I have a family member who showed that type of courage and decency.”